Who was Joe Gould, this unshakable idea of a man who compiled (or fabricated) several thousand pages of oral history, trying to make the definitive American document of the early 1900s? The great Joseph Mitchell tried to answer this in two beloved New Yorker profiles, and now Jill Lepore has come to update the record. The amount of work that obviously went into her research is daunting, yet the book zips by, leaving a very full and quite upsetting portrait of Gould in its wake. This book has as much to say about the droll world of modernist writers (Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings make repeated entrances) as it does about a very particular and enduring kind of White American approach to race and status-seeking.